Welcome

Welcome to my blog - I hope those who stumble upon it find a little inspiration for their journeys but its main purpose is to help me, a fat chick with a lifetime of experience with obesity currently living in a thin body, to manage my own personal journey!

I've lost weight before and sometimes maintained it for years - but this time, my motivation was different. Rushing towards 50 with more speed than grace, I decided 4 years ago that my health was paramount and my actual weight and appearance secondary. So, this has been a journey towards health, not away from weight.

At 45, I weighed a lifetime high of 221 lbs. I was fit, sorta - able to haul backpacks up the sides of mountains and committed to nightly ambles down to the park with the dogs, I thought I was unfairly penalized by a familial weak metabolism and told my doctor so when I posted a 5 lb gain over the previous year's weight! Even as I was whining about my obese heritage, I knew I was kidding myself and that my extra weight was only hurting me and borrowing at high interest against my future self.

But diets don't work. I've been on diets and, seriously, they don't work. Asking a 45 year old woman who could polish off a 200g bag of crinkle chips with an entire tub onion dip before dinner to switch cold turkey to carrot sticks just isn't going to work for anyone for very long. Nope - diets don't work.

You have to make a "lifestyle change" - well - yes, I've heard that before! But, frankly, most lifestyle changes look an awful lot like diets!

So - how do you make a lifestyle change in a sustainable way? It takes time - lots and lots of time! And a commitment to moving forward. I decided to make one change at a time, live with that change for awhile then add another. I vowed that unless the change was harming me in someway, I would not go back to the old habit under any circumstance.

The first week - I gave up french fries. Those deep fried, delicious sticks of potatoey goodness - I love french fries. So, I stopped eating them. Still ate everything else - just stopped eating french fries. Within a few weeks, I stopped thinking about french fries and decided to move on to the next change.

In my next post, I'll remember some of the best changes I've made - hope you'll enjoy them too!